Not so much a general sports blog as an irregularly updated desperate plea for help.

Monday, December 29, 2008

Fronts: Rearranging deck chairs on the HMCS Royal Mavesty

One New Year's Resolution is to pay Kingston Frontenacs GM-for-life Larry Mavety the odd compliment, even if it's of the left-handed variety.

The GM of the team which will be the last in the 60-team Canadian Hockey League to crack double digits in the win column this season (the Val-d'Or Foreurs go for the big one-oh tonight and the Portland Winter Hawks do so Wednesday) should get credit for his latest shuffle of spare parts, shipping Anthony Peters to Saginaw for a fifth-round draft pick and bringing in Kanata native Paul Dorsey to be the backup goalie. Give Mavety some credit. He actually managed to find a goalie who's coming from a team with a worse record than Kingston.

Dorsey, who bounced around the QMJHL as a backup as a 17-year-old last season, had been playing with the Restigouche Tigers, who far and away own the basement in the Maritime Junior A Hockey League (hardly the upper-echelon provincial Junior A league in Canada). The toothless Tigers have just five wins in 33 games this season and are scoring less than two goals per game, which means Dorsey has some grounding in what he can expect in Kingston. He actually did keep his save percentage a smidge above .900 while playing for a terrible team, which more or less made him a Maritime league equivalent to Mavric Parks, Kingston's No. 1 goalie.

Who knows, maybe there more to Dorsey than the numbers he put up as a backup in the QMJHL, or it it's just a classic Mavatism from a hockey atavism. When you're losing, just make sure you don't keep losing with the same guys. Anyone who says you have as much chance of getting anywhere making minor deals as a hamster does while running on his little wheel, well, who are they to find fault with someone hailed as an "astute hockey man" by no less a source than Fronts owner Doug Springer, the one who probably thinks Sam Pollock is a subspecies of fish?

Meantime, don't cry for a goalie who just jumped 15 spots in the overall OHL standings by going from Kingston to Saginaw. When you apply Frontenacs logic, it is Anthony Peters' fault that he wasn't a ridiculously good goalie despite never playing, never having anyone indicate they believe in him and never having anyone try to help him sharpen his skills. You know the drill with Mavety — if some player doesn't magically develop into a superstar, it's all his fault. It never has anything to do with the owner, the front office, the coaching or the other 19 players in their charge.

The Fronts weren't going to make the playoffs with Peters. They can miss them without him while he and fellow Kingston parolee Kyle Bochek are getting ready to play in the post-season with the surprising Spirit. The HMCS Royal Mavesty will sail on, even if the hole in the boat is as big as the one in the GM's head.

We should all be standing on shore, applauding Mavety. Hopefully, it won't come off as sarcastic.

Incidentally, Hockey Now, which is a freebie publication distributed at rinks in Ontario, gave Save The Fronts a plug recently:

A fan site dedicated to ousting GM Larry Mavety (who they call the Royal Mavesty) and owner Doug Springer is gaining a lot of traction with area fans and makes some very strong points. It is savethefronts.wordpress.com.